I thank both
Digerati and
plodr for their useful information.
When in the cold off state, you can switch Ethernet ports on the back of your router too. And if me, I would swap Ethernet cables since they are cheap but critical network devices that are easily damaged.
You might also look at the various ipconfig commands. From an elevated command prompt, enter ipconfig /? and press Enter to see your options and note, in particular, the /release, /flushdns, and /renew commands.
I am going to change the Ethernet cable from my computer to the router. It’s 50ft but needs to be about 60ft to really relieve all the stress at the connector ends. The only readily available longer option is 100ft, or 50ft coupled to a 10ft. IMO the 100ft, even with the slack coiled up in an 18in diameter circle, will perform better than the two-cables-coupled version.
BTW: when the problem occurred,
ipconfig would not allow any state changing options, only informational options, saying something to the effect that there was no connectivity and IP status could not be changed.
First make sure you have the correct adapter driver archived off the computer in case you need to reinstall it. Write down the date and version so you can tell if the driver changed.
I use
Perfect Updater to maintain my drivers. It has an option to backup (and restore) all or selected drivers in a timestamped series of backups. It always backs up any driver it replaces.
Also make sure in Windows 7, if you have automatic updates turned on that you do not have driver updates on.
I don’t see any option in the
Control Panel->Windows Update->Change Settings path to opt out of driver updates, but I run W.U. with the
Check for updates but let me choose whether to download and install them option, so I specifically accept only those updates I think are appropriate. (This was necessary when I was having a lot of trouble with W.U. to get any updates applied.) I'll now be extra not to let any identified driver updates through, for the reason explained in the last paragraphs.
Way back in my Windows 2K days, MS "updated" my ethernet driver and I lost connectivity. That's when I stopped allowing MS to update my drivers.
I think you just nailed what really happened. I have been directing
Perfect Updater to update anything it found, and after running it today, guess what it found:
This flagged the Ethernet driver that the repair shop loaded, which I now believe fixed the problem – the adapter reset sequence being unnecessary unless required after a driver update. As I think back now, the LAN connection failed on a Sunday, the day after my Saturday weekly scheduled
Perfect Updater run. This maybe a “recovered memory" but I think it updated the Ethernet driver that day. Next reboot on Sunday – no Ethernet connectivity. I have now marked that driver to be ignored in
Perfect Updater runs. Not knowing the adapter-Ethernet architecture, I ignored the replaced driver which I could probably have fixed simply restoring the set of backed up network drivers. (
Perfect Updater categorizes all the drivers nicely by function.)
I will save all this valuable information, including the recommended reading from
plodr.